Reading lately

The American Top 40 chart includes more dance songs, more songs performed by DJs, and significantly more white artists than its counterpart, the Billboard charts.

Shit’s racist. I used to listen to the Ryan Seacrest Top 40 driving between Chicago and Michigan because it was one of the few things that I could listen to consistently along that entire drive on just a few radio stations. It wasn’t exactly quality radio, but it kept me awake.

The business meets somewhere at the crossroads of public relations and payola—a tradition as old as the music industry itself, historically used to define the illegal practice of record companies paying for commercial radio airtime. (Under U.S. law and FCC regulations, Payola is illegal on radio, but those laws do not apply to digital streaming platforms.) According to a 2015 Billboard article, a major-label marketing executive confirmed that pay-for-play is (or was) definitely happening.“According to a source, the price can range from $2,000 for a playlist with tens of thousands of fans to $10,000 for the more well-followed playlists.” And many are already calling the platform’s new “Sponsored Songs” endeavor a 2017 incarnation of payola.

I keep thinking I’ll get sick of Spotify thinkpieces but I’m not there yet. This one covers (in part) how Spotify structures their service to prioritize playlists over albums or other artist-created works, instead effectively reinstating payola and creating pay-to-playlists that then earn top billing all throughout the service. Me, I make my own playlists most of the time.

Everyone wants streaming music to be cheap or free for listeners, offer every song ever recorded, be made available on every device, be consistently lucrative for the industry, and give new and established artists robust support for new music. We all want snow that isn’t cold or wet. In principle, everyone is willing to pay, and everyone is willing to compromise, but no one is willing to compromise enough.

Womp womp. This is why for all of my use and support of services like Spotify and SoundCloud, now that I can afford it, I’m trying to buy the music that matters to me when possible. Less likely to disappear that way.

Confronting my own aversion to anger asked me to shift from seeing it simply as an emotion to be felt, and toward understanding it as a tool to be used: part of a well-stocked arsenal.

Leslie Jamison is one of my favorite essayists, and this is no exception.

Writing Lately

I wrote two posts about analyzing my personal music data corpus. Reflecting on a decade of (quantified) music listening fits in with the rest of my blog posts about music, taking the personal tack to the quantified side of things. I also wrote up how I did all the analysis for my company blog, 10 Years of Listens: Analyzing My Music Data with Splunk. I’ve done some more analyses since these posts, like building something that lets me review the listening patterns for a specific artist compared with the dates that I’ve seen them in concert, and I’m working on analyzing if there is an average listen threshold before I see a band in concert (or not).

I also wrote about the importance that climbing has had in my life over the last year and a half in Finding Myself on the Wall. Grateful to get back on the wall tomorrow.

I took the time last year to start converting a dormant side project into a blogging series to share the links I’d collected. Calling it Borders on the Web, I post reminders of the borders that do exist on the web, as much as the techno-utopians in the world might like to pretend that they’re going away.

Listening Lately

The trend in the last year or so toward more disco vibes has been… unexpectedly awesome. Going to see at least three of these artists live in the next few months… hoping to see more music from Thunder Jackson and Disco Despair soon too.

Some great DJ sets / mixtapes on here too. Seeing the xx live last year was a highlight, almost entirely because of Jamie xx. Realized that’s a show I’d pay more than I’d like to admit to go see if it were just him DJing. Haven’t managed to see Alex Cruz yet, though he’s been in the city a couple times since I’ve been here.